Why We Built BrainDojo Kids: Handwriting, and a Board Game

Most apps for young children are built to be watched. Something moves, a sound plays, a character celebrates, and the child taps once to make the next thing happen. It holds attention beautifully, and almost nothing is left afterward. We built BrainDojo Kids around the opposite bet: that a three-year-old will stay with something because they are the one doing the work, not in spite of it. Here is the thinking behind it.

Why Handwriting Comes First

The core of the app is a child moving their own hand and leaving a mark that stays on the screen.

That choice is not just aesthetic. The trace, copy, write sequence follows research on handwriting itself. Five-year-olds who printed letters by hand later showed reading-related brain activity when viewing those letters, while children who traced or typed the same letters did not (James & Engelhardt, 2012). Thirty-eight children aged 3 to 5 practiced for three weeks, and the handwriting group recognized letters better than the typing group (Longcamp et al., 2005). In an EEG study of university students, handwriting engaged more widespread brain connectivity than typing (Van der Weel & Van der Meer, 2024).

None of this research studied our app, and we are careful not to claim otherwise. What it gave us was a direction: if writing by hand is the part that matters, then the app’s job is to maximize the time a child spends actually writing, and minimize everything else.

Why the Guide Fades

A tracing app that only ever traces is a coloring book with rules. The interesting question is what happens when the guide goes away.

So every course walks four steps. Trace the shape. Copy it with a model beside you. Write it with nothing to look at. Then try a short challenge that uses it. Each step removes one piece of support, and the last one is where a child finds out they can do it alone. That moment is the product. Everything before it exists to make it reachable.

Why a Learning App Contains a Board Game

This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth explaining.

A child practicing alone is doing something valuable, but it is a solitary picture: one child, one screen, headphones in. We did not want to ship only that. So the second half of the app is a board game for two to four players sharing one device. You roll, you collect stars and coins, you land on a square and suddenly everyone is solving the same puzzle, or two players are facing each other from opposite ends of the screen.

The device stops being a thing that separates people and becomes the thing they are gathered around. That is a different object in a household, even though the code lives in the same app. And the mini games inside the board game are the same counting, memory, and comparison activities from the solo side, which means the family game is quietly also practice.

Why the Daily Picks Are Only Three

We could show a child every course and every game at once. We deliberately do not. Today’s Training offers three picks, and then the day’s suggestion is finished.

Three is short enough to fit before dinner or in a waiting room, and short enough that a session tends to end while a child still wants more. That is the state we want them to leave in. A stamp calendar records the days, so what accumulates is a streak of small sessions rather than one long afternoon that nobody wants to repeat.

Why Their Own Handwriting Becomes the Font

Of everything in the app, My Font is the feature we are most attached to. Fill in the character chart in your child’s own handwriting, and the whole app switches over to their letters. Menus, labels, everything, in the wobbling hand of a four-year-old.

Each version is saved with the date and the age it was written at. So over a couple of years it stops being a font and becomes a record: this is how they wrote at four, and here is the same chart at six. We have not found a better way to show a child that the work is theirs.

Why There Are No Ads and No Account

This app is handed to children. That fact settles a lot of design arguments on its own.

No ads, of any kind. No account to create, no email to hand over, no sign-in wall between a child and the thing they opened the app to do. Parent settings sit behind a parental gate, and a daily time limit you set will lock the app when it is reached, so the app takes the awkward part of “that’s enough for today” off your hands.

These are unglamorous decisions that no one notices when they are done right. They are also the reason a parent can put the tablet down and walk into the next room.

A Small App, Made Carefully

BrainDojo Kids does not claim to diagnose, treat, or guarantee improvements in cognitive ability. It is an educational game. What it tries to do is make the time a child spends writing by hand into something they want to keep doing, and then give the family a reason to sit down around the same screen.

To see it in practice, read our getting started guide, our tips for daily use, or who the app is for. All related posts are under the BrainDojo Kids tag.

If this way of thinking makes sense to you, we would be glad for you to try it.